Chris Rock at the Oscars: Wildly funny on a topic that’s no joke

Host Chris Rock speaks onstage during the 88th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on February 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California.

Host Chris Rock speaks onstage during the 88th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on February 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California.

Photo: Kevin Winter, Getty Images

Photo: Kevin Winter, Getty Images

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Host Chris Rock speaks onstage during the 88th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on February 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California.

Host Chris Rock speaks onstage during the 88th Annual Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre on February 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California.

Photo: Kevin Winter, Getty Images

Chris Rock at the Oscars: Wildly funny on a topic that’s no joke

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Chris Rock, wearing a white dinner jacket, delivered what will be one of the most remembered opening monologues in the 88-year history of the Oscars on Sunday night from the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles.

It was funny, it was smart and, most of all, when you stopped laughing, it should have made you think. No one could have asked for more.

For weeks, everyone wondered what he would say about the fact that there are no African Americans among this year’s nominees for the acting categories. Would Rock even go through with the hosting gig? Or would he follow others like Jada Pinkett Smith and Spike Lee and boycott the ceremony?

Well, Rock showed up, and then some. Comically, he killed in his opening monologue, but it will still cause controversy among those who think the issue of racism in Hollywood is no laughing matter.

It isn’t, but then again, humor doesn’t always trivialize its targets: It can also nudge us toward considering those issues from different points of view.

From the moment Rock called the Oscars “The White People’s Choice Awards,” through the moment he greeted the audience after a commercial with the line, “Ah, and we’re black,” Rock was brilliant and in control. He wondered aloud why this year’s Oscars are so controversial. Since the Academy Awards have been handed out for 88 years, “that means that this whole black-nominees thing has happened at least 71 other times.”

Black people didn’t protest the all-white list of nominees in the ’50s and ’60s, he said, because “we were too busy being raped and lynched.”

“When your grandmother is swinging from a tree, it’s really hard to care about best cinematography short,” he cracked.

He never let up, and in the process of slinging one brilliant joke after another, managed to do the seemingly impossible: He both homed in on the real basis of the controversy and temporarily defused it.

The real issue, he said via a joke about attending a Hollywood fundraiser for President Obama, is that the industry is filled with writers, producers and actors who don’t hire black people but are “the nicest people on Earth. They’re liberals.”

Fantasy casts

The Oscars’ attempt to defuse the controversy with humor continued with a hilarious montage, reimagining several Oscar-nominated films recast with African American actors. Tracy Morgan in full drag as “The Danish Girl”? Whoopi Goldberg doing a walk-on in “Joy” as a mop-slinging cleaning lady; Chris Rock marooned in space a la “The Martian,” while Jeff Daniels and Kristen Wiig bemoaned the cost of having to bring the “black astronaut” back to Earth.

The montage was effective, and yet you may have watched it with the thought that actors in the original films, people like Jennifer Lawrence, Matt Damon and Eddie Redmayne — no doubt among those previously cited “nicest people on Earth” — should have enough clout in the industry to demand that more African Americans and other people of color be hired for their films.

Another effective segment came with Angela Bassett doing a mock “Black History Moment,” in which she seemed to be walking up to honoring Will Smith but instead cited the contributions of Jack Black.

There was a minimum of direct speechifying about the diversity issue, although Kevin Hart, introducing a best song performance by the Weeknd, took “a moment to applaud all my actors and actresses of color who weren’t nominated.

“These problems of today will eventually become problems of the old,” he said, as if trying to explain why he wasn’t boycotting the ceremony.

Academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs did what she had to do, offering a rose-colored “We Are the World”-style speech about the academy’s plan to increase diversity over the next few years. “Everyone in the Hollywood community has a role to play,” she said, “so that we can accurately reflect the world today.”

Translation: The academy can do only so much until those aforementioned “nicest people on Earth” decide that they’ll hire people of color behind and in front of the cameras.

To my mind, the moment when every white person in Hollywood should have stopped laughing came when Rock went to a movie theater in Compton and interviewed audience members, seeking their opinions on the nominated films — “Trumbo,” “Spotlight,” etc. No one had ever heard of those movies. Yeah, it was funny, but it also reminded Hollywood that by failing to make a real effort to diversify its films, it is telling an enormous segment of the American population that its money isn’t needed.

Rock was an equal opportunity humorist with his diversity-based jokes. At the usual point when the academy’s accountant — PricewaterhouseCoopers — is announced, two Asian kids and a kid named David Moskowitz walked on stage with tiny briefcases.

“If anybody’s upset about that joke, just tweet about it on your phone, which was also made by these kids,” Rock quipped.

Aside from Rock and the strategy of facing the diversity controversy with humor, how was the show itself? Actually, not bad. The academy tried to keep up the pace of the show with a new gimmick: For the first time, as winners made their way to the stage, the people, pets and deities they wanted to thank were scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

Well, nice try, academy (something we’ll probably be saying next year when there still won’t be enough people of color in the nominees list). The scrolling didn’t do that much to cut down on the onstage bloviating, and it still ran late.

Time to get serious

What everyone will be talking about on Monday, and perhaps for a while, is whether humor was appropriate or effective in addressing the academy’s problem with diversity. To be sure, it would have bombed if an African American host hadn’t set the pace with such brilliance. Fortunately, the white Oscar winners seemed to know better than to chance being seen as disingenuous by talking about the diversity issue, when many of them, in fact, have been lax in doing something about the problem.

Jokes aside, as it were, the humor may have been entertaining and diverting for a few hours Sunday night. But now it’s time for the film industry to stop laughing and get serious about diversity. In fact, it’s well past time.